Madness Madness!

Have we all, every one of us, stared at a small humanlike doll and thought to ourselves, "What would it be like if this doll were like 35+ dudes and I starved them for six months in the University of Minnesota football stadium?" Of course we have; there's no need to even phrase it as a question. A notable fellow of science thought the same thing during World War II, and the results were the Minnesota Starvation Experiments, in which at least one dude just went full raccoon and started wandering around campus at night eating garbage. None of that is made up.

Meanwhile in northeastern Oklahoma, the Duke Boys were watching, helpless, as Ole Boss Hogg stole a bunch of American Indian land AGAIN, dug a bafflingly high number of lead mines, abandoned them when they stopped making money, and left countless piles of lead and rock dust hundreds of feet high next to stagnant pools of acidic lead water sitting on top of gigantic underground man-made caverns that were supported only by old boards! Don't worry though—the Dukes never put two and two together to pin it on Boss Hogg, as they'd been severely lead poisoned by the air and water of Picher, Oklahoma, one of our nation's very worst Superfund sites that's uninhabitable to this very day. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Tar Creek, one of the more perfect examples of Oklahoma fellating businesses while said businesses burns the entire state down and puts on a fake nose and big glasses when it's time to foot the cleanup bill! Join us, won't you?

A lot of people say dentistry lost its street cred when it started happening in "Offices" with "Sterile Instruments" and "Windows that close," and at one point the Street Dentist who legally changed his first name to Painless to avoid a lawsuit would have agreed with you. Today we learn about this ... guy ... in the history of dentistry. Plus, a look at Tokugawa Ieyasu, the actual guy at the center of James Clavell's incredibly lengthy but surprisingly pretty good historical novel "Shogun."
PROGRAMMING NOTE: The guy Amanda couldn't remember in this episode was Charles Bronson.

Most days you get up, have a coffee, look at the same six gifs again, and then it's off to work. But what if you didn't have the daily grind to distract you, and you could focus on doing the things that really feed your soul?

If the things that feed your soul include dressing in blackface and pranking the entire Imperial Navy, you've got some racist shit going on. But also the story of the Dreadnought hoax will be of particular interest to you! Meanwhile, if you've ever been an oppressed native woman in dire enough straights to accept a caretaker job on an expedition designed to claim an Arctic island for Canada even though literally everyone agrees it's Russian territory, only to find yourself the only survivor, you are probably Ada Blackjack, because to our knowledge she's the only person that's happened to. Hear all about it on this week's Madness Madness!

What better way to ring in the new year with a solid six months of deafening, damaging aural assaults that you're powerless to stop? Other than a bracing series of square dances, nothing I can think of! This week we learn about what would ultimately become one of the most important reasons we don't have cross-country supersonic passenger flights. We also learn about what is almost certainly the rootin'est, tootin'est American tradition of all: the venerable square dance. All this knowledge, delivered with the benefit of several bottles of Prosecco and a poop shotgun*! Join us, won't you?

*Poop shotgun does not fire poop. Restrictions apply.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lady? If yes, were you a Lady in the United States during the 19th Century? You are doubtless familiar, then, with Godey's Lady's Book, a source of densely packed text, hand-colored fashion plates, piano sheet music, and the odd Edgar Allan Poe short story ("for the love of Godey, Montresor!"). All this, plus a look at the troubled romance between legendary circus aerialists: Lillian Leitzel, a tiny woman who is stronger than you or any man you know, and Alfredo Codona, a shining star of the Flying Codonas, shunned for years by the Walking Codonas, who were generally agreed to be fiercely jealous of their far more glamorous cousins. Join us, won't you?

You know what's awesome? VICTORIAN LADY THIEVES. You know what else is awesome? Science Fiction! Mostly! Partly. It's complicated. Today we hear tales of both things!

Two pivotal questions lie at the heart of this week's episode. One: To what extent have we been collectively missing out as a society since the practice of soap carving fell by the wayside? Two: What happens when Erin and Amanda don't call their dad?

By the time July 4, 1976 had rolled around, a lot of people had put a lot of effort into crushing the whole thing into a bureaucratic logjam. A lot more people had made sure not one single American had the option of forgetting, even for a moment, that it was the BICENTENNIAL AND EVERYBODY BETTER AMERICA REAL REAL HARD STARTING RIGHT NOW, GOT IT?!? By that point, chiropractic medicine had begun to ease into a slightly less quackery-intensive version of itself (don't worry, it was still pretty batshit). Learn about both on today's Madness Madness, now brought to you in color!

Today, a lighthearted look at England's long and storied history of, as an official act, killing men for being gay. It goes back a while! It's awful and pointless, but ... uh. Well. No actual "but" there, as it turns out. We'll also examine a group of racist vigilantes of the pedigree that's only possible in central Missouri. Also they called themselves "The Bald Knobbers," and the fact that they went around beating people for moral failings while having a name only slightly less pornographic than "Sleazy Gang Bang XI: Thursday Night at The Man Hole" is an irony seemingly lost on them. It's just gross. Join us, won't you?

George Pullman, it should be universally agreed, was a huge piece of shit. Nobody who isn't a huge piece of shit has himself buried in hundreds of cubic feet of concrete and railroad ties to keep his employees from besmirching his corpse. Today we'll be talking about the Pullman Porters, black men and women who migrated north for a better life after the War the South Started Because They Didn't Want to Stop Owning Other Human Beings and found work—up to 400 hours of it per month! This did ultimately lead to unionization, but not before a whole lot of racism from both the Pullman Company and the existing employees' union. Then we'll hear about The Hitler Diaries, which aired for 8 seasons on The CW and starred Ian Somerhalder. Wait, no. The Hitler Diaries were a different thing, but were also fake. Join us for our 69th* episode, won't you?
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